


i have toured the endless starlight (take me home)

by outlaw_baby



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: F/F, Get Together, POV Second Person, Reunions, Surreal Magic, Ten Years Later, anthy teases her, utena experiences growth in perceptive abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:53:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25364920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outlaw_baby/pseuds/outlaw_baby
Summary: Listen now as she speaks again from years past. Listen well to what loves she said to you through the nerves of it, through your head strong, thick skin, she wrote it all down to be spoken softly, just so later. Listen now to the thrum of memory and you’ll know again, for the first time, her love words.
Relationships: Himemiya Anthy/Tenjou Utena
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	i have toured the endless starlight (take me home)

**Author's Note:**

> title from starlight by the wailin' jennys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap9cGMJqwuQ
> 
> thanks carolyn, for the tea and poison and stabbing and love <3 and also for reading

Hi Utena,

It’s Utena, again, don’t knock this one off the night stand and step on it! Maybe I should write one about that too? Anyways she is silent in the loudest way possible, she drinks tea in small almost nothing sips like she is afraid of the prospect of finishing the cup and yet excited for it. Oh and she’s evil. Or she likes to think so. 

You love her, I’m sure of it now.

Utena

-

Today you had remembered an evil little smile over the brim of a white porcelain tea cup, steaming still and brown like muddy pools in the way good earthy tea tends to be. Her fingers had been long, that you had known from the time your ex boyfriend held your hand with his stumpy little fingers and you’d nearly concussed yourself realizing how wrong it was to have such small, thick fingers around yours. Ah! That hadn’t lasted long after…. Today you drink tea slowly as if to concuss yourself again with the aroma of steeping things, the smell of waiting and waiting, the slow pull of your mouth around sips. In the end you’re to impatient for all that and gulp it all down and besides no starry concussion waits with her face bound in the midst of the pain, no more than that smile so you down your tea quick and look at the leaves for fortune in wet things and drained things and about to rot things.

-

It is bright and you are dappled with light, fresh on your skin, knees redenning but only just after days soaking in the heat of it. This is your favorite tree, your favorite hundred year old roots to prod your sometimes aching back with. In a letter somewhere you had written something about a tree and knees and seconds so eternal they fell onto your love as only drops of bleeding heaven can. It had felt as such then though then you didn’t know it and it wasn’t eternity only the small, aching steps towards the cool breath of forever.

You either have sever brain damage or magic is real and so is your love and you like to believe in magic as sometimes you see things like you haven’t before, like little smiles that conceal a unfolding of sugar, teaspoon, flower, love that hadn’t been there before. So you refute your own brain damage on the reconstructed world of magic and forevers. 

-

Hi Utena,

Me (you) again. Have you noticed before she can talk to everything? It doesn’t really make sense, even knowing it now, after it all ended (or began?). She just smiles and it all smiles back. If magic is real, and it probably is, then it’s probably in her. Look out for her hands because they have long fingers and like to hold yours! That’ll be a real tip off…

So yeah: talks to it all and they sing back, hands are long and usually full of tea cups and your hands and living things and magic, somehow, still not sure how…

Oh! Oh! Oh! Most important of all!! Don’t you dare forget, like you did before!! She loved you too.

Utena

-

It had been years maybe days of collecting and collecting and riffling through magics of day breaks and sunsets, trying to pick out traces of memory from within details of clouds never before seen and breezes whistling trees yet one day older. A little mouse, so small and plump with cake, you could tell by the frosting around his mouth, his little hands reaching up for you. He climbs your legs fondly, as if knowing them already and it is only as he drifts off that a woman comes with a smile soft as grass points and says, “Chu Chu.”

“Chu Chu,” you repeat mutely and you can barely comprehend her face, this woman in bright pink, buttons and skirts so neat and cute you smile fondly as if you have known her and now are happy to see she has worn a new outfit that suits her perfectly.

“He likes to eat, then run, then sleep,” she says, this woman, and you nod.

“His name is Chu Chu?”

She smiles then, so sadly it is a wash of years and years of sorrow cool against your bones, a cold tidal splash of it. Your back shivers, where it has been broken, as if stabbed again by this woman’s smile. Softly through the solar plexus, out between the lungs. 

“Yes,” she says. She picks him up by the tail, he startles and whines. She makes to leave and you say so quick you crack your back trying to stand, “Wait! Have we met?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to remember.”

“I have a hard time remembering, some things.”

“Sometimes memory is like a slow cup of tea and its best you sip bit by bit or else you’d burn your tongue. In the end you finish it, so what’s the matter with a wait?”

“I’m not so patient.”

“You have to learn sometime, Utena,” the woman says, teasing you can tell by her lips, as if you know what shape they make when they are egging you on oh so well.

“Will you teach me?”

“I could,” she says slowly and there with that smile, “Do you like tea?”

-

She speaks softly yet loud enough to always always be heard, even over the screech of motorbikes and even that one time there was a loud clatter of a teapot shattering that ruptured the small little cafe from the inside out and stilled it into a shock wave of silence. Even as she said, “I love your hair,” even though ‘love” should have been shattered like porcelain falling from a slippery handed server it rang clear to your ears.

You can never quite remember her after she is gone, only impressions like soft bare feet in mud.

-

You scour your letters as soon as you slam the door of your apartment closed and blink twice. If only you’d organized them all better. There are some in drawers, some below the couch, some between couch cushions, some on top of the couch, a few above the bathroom sink and one crinkled roughly behind the kitchen cabinet like a bad secret. In the end there’s a lopsided stack and you go about making lists of what constructs your love. The fingers, hair, the particular angle of the smile; if only you were better at geometry as you see the angles of a forever fractal tracing themselves out as you read and read; “hands crossed” “glasses so thin they are wires, and circular too” “laughs as if she is always not just laughing at your joke but you too” “well actually laughs at you a lot” “shaved ice” “hands soft like flowers, like freshly grown flowers” “she falls every time on the blade of other’s ire” “she stabbed you” “she loved you” “she suffered” “she talked to things with no mouths and made them smile” “under trees and stars you lay together and couldn’t know you were happy”. 

Too bad you were never good at geometry or else maybe you could shape it all in your brain and know her into wholeness again.

Of all the bits and pieces of love which have come to your brain these ten years since, since what you are never quite sure, never once has a name come to fit the details of love, loss, hands, smiles, evil, pain, grief, shaved ice, mice, snails and roses into the confines of a thing her brain can wrap around, an object meant for her tongue to roll over. 

-

She takes you next to a botanical garden, four days after tea, your apartment still in shambles from this rabid re-collecting, recollecting of memories’ collections. You are out of breath and heaving with a shinning excitement as you try and remember your list, list of your love. Try to do the math and fill this woman’s body with it. You are impatient with not knowing, jittering creature of almost answers and maths unsolvable to the Utena mind. She smiles and you are in the gardens for free, as if she were a rose grown there only now revisiting. 

Her hands scrape soft and sweet across petal backs and it all seems to scream with harmonious scented joy, the flowers in jubilation. 

You take the afternoon as slow as you can manage, scoop up seconds between fingers, softened glass shards waiting in the sands of time for your fingers to pluck, moments of wonder. It is magic you are sure, that pulls rose stems towards her and her benevolent hands, always a slow, small, wait wait just a second more. Magic in how her pockets are full of shiny objects of wonder for Chu Chu, a ready sweet to melt on her tongue, lost and forever lingering. 

The afternoon culminates in a slow simmer of conspiring winds, always blowing your hair into your face, her’s majestically out of it. She likes to watch you fumble fingers through your pink hair, smile quick and small. She likes sitting under your favorite tree and listening to your escapades as a free lance photographer. She asks if you’d take a picture of her and you do.

It prints small and blurred and she admires your skill nonetheless.

“You’ve always had an eye for that. Framing,” she says and you think it might not be so much of a compliment.

-

You are thinking of stars in the afternoon, wondering where they wander to in the day, wondering why myths play themselves out through the cold bleakness of space, should they be warnings? 

You read once of a prince who got lost in the stars, trying to save the the universe but losing sight of it in the process; so alone he lost his way, lost the universe, himself. He is a comet now, burning brightly alone, so untouched his love echoes back to him like a scream.

You had either read it or dreamt it and either way it is a story you tell yourself, lodged soft as a thorn between ribs. You tell her of it and she is soft in saying it’s good then, to stay amongst the dirt and worms and snails and grass. Flowers come from her fingers, between nothing and her love and you hold onto it until it wilts and browns, which isn’t for a month in the warm water of your windowsill vase. In that time you see her every other day and recall the planetarium, the circular bed, her hand around your wrist in a promise you forget to keep, forgot to remember. 

Every other day you write a note (Utena, Dear, Remember this well in the hollow folds of your grey brain), sealed with a kiss, lips sealed around words unformed, unshaped by lungs.

You wake the night the rose dies with poison on your lips. Oh the poison of love.

-

You are at a different cafe and talking rapidly, tea cooled, her smile just cooler. You are speaking of countrysides, of cow photos and apple trees, of small houses with large windows, speaking like if eventually you spoke enough, spewed all the words in your brain the new ones would come, the ones with her name and her love and the full shape of her face. You talk and talk and she sits with joy and wonder at you into the afternoon of your mind’s unending unraveling. You have found today there is a lot more in your brain than you had thought for it is only until orange peaks out like a wink between awnings that you realize the cafe has closed down, left you both like empty chairs.

“Huh,” you say.

“You have a lot to say, Utena.”

“It never ends. Sorry, I- well I thought I would run out of words eventually.”

“Like a mobious strip.”

“Yeah- no, what’s that?”

She tears it from a thin strip of napkin, she tears quite slow, quite straight and precise, folding it between her fingers, between those spaces where matter disappears and reappears anew, into something so eternal she looks on it for minutes of wonder. A star is blinking above them as coolness sweeps the street and they are ruffled with the onset of night so soft as to not disturb the little strip. Her spine tingles as if she should know where she should go next.

“See, you spin and spin it and you never come to an end because it folds over itself and starts anew, different,” she says.

“You’re so very wise!”

“I’m not. I only learn when people teach me things.” Oh her lips, mobius strip of their own, an eternity of her mockery. 

“Will you ever tell me your name?” you ask.

“You already know it,” she replies and her glasses like moons shine big with hope.

That night you sleep with your arm outstretched, unsurprised when you dream of her clutching it. It is only upon waking, upon stretching and creaking your bones, thinking of light like falling gold dust and her morning robe and the sweetness of a breakfast you can't wait to have sticky on your tongue, it is only after that you remember his name. Chu Chu. And it will be later, in her arms in the park, staring up at her with eyes so big and blue the sky shrivels in their reflection, it will be then that her name falls as plump cherries from your lips and she is wrapped whole again by your deranged mind, full against your back, a sword through your amnesia. You’ll say “Himemiya” and she’ll say “Yes, Utena” and you will kiss away her little smile with your lips like trees and flowers bursting over with the progeny of loved things. And your bodies will twist into a strip like forever in the grass of quick fading tree shadows and drops of rain falling everywhere but you.

That is this evening’s plan, now you write a letter, your last, fold it and burn it in your palm until you can toss the ash out the window and hear its whispers in the wind. It is stillness before you are in motion again. Now you run quick and forget to put socks on and forget to lock your door and forget your keys anyway, all until you remember her into your arms and mouth and mind again. All until she is again and Utena, she remembers herself too.

-

Utena,

Ah you are such a fool! So busy still writing your own little letters, writing your love you almost forgot to look at her!

Chu Chu. That’s what his name was. Now go to her before you forget!

All the best and never more,  
Utena


End file.
